A new low (as in, high) for atmospheric CO2

Lindsay AbramsTuesday, May 27, 2014Carbon dioxide levels in the Northern Hemisphere reached a new milestone this April, the World Meteorological Organization announced
Monday, with monthly atmospheric concentrations topping 400 parts per
million for the first time in what’s believed to be millions of years.

The
news itself will surprise few — without the significant mitigation of
greenhouse gas emissions, we all understand this to be the path we’re
heading down — but symbolically, it packs a punch. “This should serve as
yet another wakeup call about the constantly rising levels of
greenhouse gases which are driving climate change. If we are to preserve
our planet for future generations, we need urgent action to curb new
emissions of these heat trapping gases,” WMO Secretary-General Michel
Jarraud said in a statement. “Time is running out.”

The WMO
reiterated that CO2 remains in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, and
in the ocean for even longer. From 2002 to 2012, the agency said, it
was responsible for a full 85 percent of the increase in “radiative
forcing” — the warming effect on the climate.

CO2 levels tend to
spike in April, before spring vegetation arrives to absorb some of it.
Monitoring stations in the Arctic have been recording monthly averages
this high since 2012, but as recently as April of last year, CO2 levels
exceed 400 ppm on only several days; this year marked the first time
that the monthly average for the Northern Hemisphere, where the majority
of man-made emissions occur, was firmly set above that threshold. And
things look like they’ll continue to head in that direction: The global
annual average, the WMO warned, will likely surpass 400 ppm by 2015 or 2016.

Why collapse and salvation are hard to distinguish from each other.

Let
us imagine that in 3030BC the total possessions of the people of Egypt
filled one cubic metre. Let us propose that these possessions grew by
4.5% a year. How big would that stash have been by the Battle of Actium
in 30BC? This is the calculation performed by the investment banker
Jeremy Grantham(1).

Go on, take a guess. Ten
times the size of the pyramids? All the sand in the Sahara? The
Atlantic ocean? The volume of the planet? A little more? It’s 2.5
billion billion solar systems(2). It does not take you long, pondering
this outcome, to reach the paradoxical position that salvation lies in
collapse.

To succeed is to destroy ourselves. To fail is to
destroy ourselves. That is the bind we have created. Ignore if you must
climate change, biodiversity collapse, the depletion of water, soil,
minerals, oil; even if all these issues were miraculously to vanish, the
mathematics of compound growth make continuity impossible.

Economic
growth is an artefact of the use of fossil fuels. Before large amounts
of coal were extracted, every upswing in industrial production would be
met with a downswing in agricultural production, as the charcoal or
horse power required by industry reduced the land available for growing
food. Every prior industrial revolution collapsed, as growth could not
be sustained(3). But coal broke this cycle and enabled – for a few
hundred years – the phenomenon we now call sustained growth.

It
was neither capitalism nor communism that made possible the progress and
the pathologies (total war, the unprecedented concentration of global
wealth, planetary destruction) of the modern age. It was coal, followed
by oil and gas. The meta-trend, the mother narrative, is carbon-fuelled
expansion. Our ideologies are mere subplots. Now, as the most accessible
reserves have been exhausted, we must ransack the hidden corners of the
planet to sustain our impossible proposition.

On Friday, a few
days after scientists announced that the collapse of the West Antarctic
ice sheet is now inevitable(4), the Ecuadorean government decided that
oil drilling would go ahead in the heart of the Yasuni national park(5).
It had made an offer to other governments: if they gave it half the
value of the oil in that part of the park, it would leave the stuff in
the ground. You could see this as blackmail or you could see it as fair
trade. Ecuador is poor, its oil deposits are rich: why, the government
argued, should it leave them untouched without compensation when
everyone else is drilling down to the inner circle of hell? It asked for
$3.6bn and received $13m. The result is that Petroamazonas, a company
with a colourful record of destruction and spills(6), will now enter one
of the most biodiverse places on the planet, in which a hectare of
rainforest is said to contain more species than exist in the entire
continent of North America(7).

Bob Inglis wants climate change deniers to be more realistic. But can his 'free-market' environmentalism win GOP converts?

Ask Americans about "global warming", and a new study
suggests that 13% more of them will think it's a bad thing compared to
"climate change". That, it turns out, was Republicans' point: way back
in 2002, a Republican pollster warned candidates and then-President
George W Bush to avoid using the term "global warming" because people found it "frightening".

Since
then, the debate about "climate change" has become a cultural battle
and, out in the field, Republican midterm candidates are engaged in a contest to become its most strident deniers. Even on Twitter, Pat Sajak thinks you're an "unpatriotic racist" if you think climate change is a real problem.But
one Republican is trying to hold back the tide of his colleagues who
continue to fall at the feet of the (largely) oil and coal
industry-sponsored climate denial movement. Former South Carolina
Congressman Bob Inglis, a Republican, is the movement's best
advertisement – a real live conservative convert. His story has the arc
of a religious experience, in part because it includes one.Inglis
says he was first asked to consider the possibility that climate change
is real because of his son and the rest of his family – "and they're
the ones who could change the locks," he told me last week – so he
decided to listen. Then, as a member of the House Science committee, he
went to Antarctica and saw the ice-core samples that tell the story of
human's impact on the environment.Lastly, he had a
conversation with a Australian climatologist at the Great Barrier Reef,
and it became clear to Inglis that there was a spiritual component to
environmentalism that aligned with his conservative Christian faith and
not the fuzzy "earth mother" New Age environmental stereotype. "I could
see he worshipped the God of creation, and not the creation itself," he
told me here, where we're both fellows at the University of Chicago
Institute of Politics – and where I've seen him coast in wearing khakis
and a helmet, looking for all the world like tofu-eating Obama voter.Whether
you think it's the Creator or the creation that matters, mere mortals
are not doing a great job with protecting the environment – which
translates not just into sad pictures of displaced animals, but into whole populations of humans displaced and dying.
Unforunately, to Americans, that suffering seems distant and abstractly
related to climate change, and the only aspect of Inglis's own
conversion he could possibly replicate for another non-believer is to
show them those ice-core samples. And even that's the same kind of
physical evidence that keeps failing to convince people.

Nobody should have to play the frightened victim to make basic choices about her future.

What
does a good abortion look like? A few months ago, Emily Letts, a
25-year-old American clinic worker, filmed her surgical abortion and
posted the video on the internet. In the clip, Letts smiles and hums
throughout the procedure, which she chose to have simply because she did
not want to bear a child. “I feel good,” she remarks when it’s over,
shattering generations of anxiety and fear-mongering around reproductive
choice with three simple words.

The idea that abortion might be a
positive choice is still taboo. For some, the only way it can be
countenanced is if the pregnancy is an immediate threat to life or the
result of rape – meaning that the woman involved didn’t want to have sex
and as such does not deserve to be punished for the crime of acting on
desire as a female. Even then, the person having the abortion is
expected to be sorry for ever, to weep and agonise over the decision. In
Britain, the Abortion Act 1967 obliges anyone seeking a termination to
justify why continuing with a pregnancy poses a threat to her health and
well-being or that of her existing offspring. “Because I don’t want to
be pregnant” simply isn’t enough.

Hence the furore over the
glamour model Josie Cunningham’s recent announcement, through the
eyebrow-raising medium of the British tabloid press, that she is
planning to terminate her pregnancy in order to have a shot at appearing
on reality television. The national and international gossip media
scrambled to excoriate Cunningham: this was the epitome of selfishness, a
woman who would boast of having an abortion to further her career. We
live in a society that fetishises “choice” while denying half the
population the most fundamental choice of all – the choice over the
autonomy of one’s body.

Women in Northern Ireland, where the
Abortion Act 1967 does not apply, have just learned that – despite
paying towards the NHS through their taxes – they will continue to be
denied an abortion unless they can travel to England and fund it
themselves. As a result of a high court ruling, hundreds of women each
year will still find themselves having to take cheap red-eye flights to
Heathrow and Manchester, scared and alone, to have procedures they may
have gone into debt to afford.

In Northern Ireland, as in the rest
of the world, the prospect of women having full control over their
reproductive potential – the notion that we might be able to decide,
without shame or censure, whether and when and if we have children or
not – provokes fear among the powerful. When abortion is discussed in
public, it is almost always in terms of individual morality or, more
usually, of moral lapses on the part of whatever selfish, slutty women
are demanding basic human rights this week. It is rarely discussed in
terms of structural and economic inequality. Yet reproductive inequality
remains the material basis for women’s second-class status in society.
It affects every aspect of our future.

Economist Gerald Friedman warns that the much-hyped gig economy is a road to ruin for workers.

The
media are all abuzz with the changing nature of work. Exciting words
like “creativity” and “adaptability” get thrown around, specifically in
connection to the shift away from steady, full-time employment to a gig
economy of freelancers and short-term contracts. Proponents of the gig
economy, from the New York Times' Thomas Friedman to
bright-eyed TED pundits, tout it as a welcome escape from the prison of
the standard workweek and the strictures of corporate America.

Working
on a project-to-project basis will set you free, they tell us. Wired magazine has called it "the force that could save the American worker.”

But when you’re actually stuck in it, the gig economy looks quite different.

Consider the New York Freelancer’s Union: According to a report in the New York Times,
29 percent of the union’s New York City members earn less than $25,000 a
year, and in 2010, 12 percent of members nationally received some type
of public assistance. Turns out that life with no health benefits,
vacation pay or retirement plan is not a rosy picture.

Writing for Fast Company, Sarah Kessler, who went undercover to hustle for work in the gig economy, put it this way:

“For
one month, I became the ‘micro-entrepreneur’ touted by companies like
TaskRabbit, Postmates, and Airbnb. Instead of the labor revolution I had
been promised, all I found was hard work, low pay, and a system that
puts workers at a disadvantage.”

What’s really going
on is the desire of businesses to chop wages and benefit costs while
also limiting their vulnerability to lawsuits, which can happen when
salaried employees are mistreated. The burden of economic risk is
shifted even further onto workers, who lose the security and protections
of the New-Deal-era social insurance programs that were created when
long-term employment was the norm.

Nearly
20 members of the woman's family, including her father and brothers,
attacked her and her husband with batons and bricks in broad daylight
before a crowd of onlookers in front of the high court of Lahore, the
police investigator Rana Mujahid said.

Hundreds of women are murdered every year in Muslim-majority Pakistan
in so-called " honour killings" – carried out by husbands or relatives
as a punishment for alleged adultery or other illicit sexual behaviour –
but public stoning is extremely rare.

Mujahid said the woman's
father has been arrested for murder and that police were working to
apprehend all those who participated in the "heinous crime".

Another
police officer, Naseem Butt, identified the slain woman as Farzana
Parveen, 25, and said she had married Mohammad Iqbal against her
family's wishes after being engaged to him for years.

Her father,
Mohammad Azeem, had filed an abduction case against Iqbal, which the
couple was contesting, her lawyer Mustafa Kharal said. He confirmed that
she was three months pregnant.

Arranged marriages are the norm among conservative Pakistanis, who view marriage for love as a transgression.

The
Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, a private group, said in a report
last month that some 869 women were murdered in "honour killings" in
2013.

But even Pakistanis who have tracked violence against women
expressed shock at the brutal and public nature of Tuesday's killing.

"I
have not heard of any such case in which a woman was stoned to death,
and the most shameful and worrying thing is that this woman was killed
in front of a court," said Zia Awan, a prominent lawyer and human rights
activist.

He said Pakistanis who commit violence against women
are often acquitted or handed light sentences because of poor police
work and faulty prosecutions.

And why that's not a story the mainstream media likes to tell.

Paul
Krugman wrote his column this morning in the New York Times from
Europe, a place which—conservatives like Paul Ryan would like you to
believe—demonstrates the complete failure of the welfare state. That's
because, as Krugman points out, "Our political discourse is dominated by
reverse Robin-Hoodism — the belief that economic success depends on
being nice to the rich, who won’t create jobs if they are heavily taxed,
and nasty to ordinary workers, who won’t accept jobs unless they have
no alternative."

France, a country that the American media and
conservatives particularly love to bash, is having particular success in
employment rates. Krugman reports this "startling, little-known fact:
French adults in their prime working years (25 to 54) are substantially
more likely to have jobs than their U.S. counterparts."

Hmmm. There's a story you won't hear told in the mainstream media.

He continues:

It
wasn’t always that way. Back in the 1990s Europe really did have big
problems with job creation; the phenomenon even received a catchy name,
“Eurosclerosis.” And it seemed obvious what the problem was: Europe’s
social safety net had, as Representative Paul Ryan likes to warn, become
a “ hammock” that undermined initiative and encouraged dependency.

But then a funny thing happened: Europe started doing much better, while America started doing much worse. France’s prime-age employment rate
overtook America’s early in the Bush administration; at this point the
gap in employment rates is bigger than it was in the late 1990s, this
time in France’s favor. Other European nations with big welfare states,
like Sweden and the Netherlands, do even better.

What
about young people? Doesn't America, with all of its problems, still
kick France's ass when it comes to the employment rate of those younger
than 25. Yes, Krugman concedes. Then he wonders if that is something we
should be bragging about, since it is certainly due in part to the fact
that French students receive a lot more financial aid for their
education than American students do, so they are not immediately saddled
with huge debt to work off, much less work their way through school.

Pulitzer Prize winner David Cay Johnston tells Salon how America's economic story could end -- and it isn't pretty

Long
before anyone knew the name Thomas Piketty, Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist David Cay Johnston was plumbing the hidden depths of the
American tax code, revealing the myriad ways it privileges the interests
of corporations and the wealthy ahead of those of the 99 percent.
Indeed, while it may sometimes feel as if economic inequality is the new
trend, Johnston’s career reminds us that the great gulf that separates
the rich from the rest in the contemporary United States didn’t happen
overnight, but over a course of decades.

Despite coming out during the same year as “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” and “The Divide,” Johnston’s newest release, “Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality,”
is a different kind of inequality book. Rather than a sweeping overview
of centuries of economic history, or an on-the-ground examination of
how our justice system ignores the powerful while brutalizing the rest,
Johnston’s book is a collection of essays, speeches and excerpts — a
kind of inequality reader. Featuring insights from philosophers,
economists, journalists, researchers and even politicians, “Divided”
reminds us how inequality is one of those rare problems that truly
matters to all of us, no matter what our interests or chosen field.

Earlier
this week, Salon reached Johnston via telephone to discuss “Divided,”
whether American democracy can survive such great economic disparities,
and how returning to a more equal society is literally a matter of life
and death. Our conversation follows, and has been slightly edited for
clarity and length. In addition, Johnston followed up with further
thoughts via email.

What inspired you to create this book?

I had done a trilogy on hidden aspects of the American economy, “Perfectly Legal,” which was about how the rich benefit from taxes, “Free Lunch,” about all the subsidies people didn’t know about that go to rich people and corporations, and “The Fine Print,”
which was about restraint of trade and monopolies. And in speaking for
the last 10 years around the country, one of the things I learned is
that people didn’t understand that this isn’t just a function of numbers
and whatnot; they didn’t understand there’s a whole structure that
affects families, health, healthcare — which are different things —
incarceration, opportunity, exposure to environmental hazards, wage
theft and so, there was really a need here to give people a broad
understanding of, well, “How did this come about, this incredible
inequality that we didn’t have in this country until recent years?”

[After
the interview, Johnston emailed to add: "My trilogy on the American
economy explained many of the little-known, and often deceptive, laws,
regulations and official practices. But inequality involves much more
than what I had written about in the trilogy. I wanted to provide people
with a broad understanding of the issues, ranging from limited
opportunity and obstacles to achieving a modicum of prosperity, to the
remarkably cruel and thoughtless policies of the Reagan era."]

In
your introductory essay, you make a point of arguing that inequality is
not natural, that it’s something we created and, by extensions, we can
undo. But what would you say to those who, say, have read their Piketty
and are thinking this kind of inequality is endemic to capitalism?

Well,
Piketty — whose work I relied on for years and who substantiates a lot
of things that I’ve written with his research — argues that the
concentration of wealth will just continue and continue and continue. As
Herbert Stein, Richard Nixon’s chief economic adviser, famously said,
a trend will only continue as long as it can. We will either, through
peaceful, rational means, go back to a system that does not take from
the many to give to the few in all these subtle ways, or we will end up
like 18th century France. And if we end up in that awful condition, it
will be the bloodiest thing the world has even seen. So I think it’s
really important to get a handle on this inequality. After all, since
the end of the Great Recession, one-third of all income increases in
this country went to just 16,000 households, 95 percent of it went to
the top 1 percent, and the bottom 90 percent’s incomes fell, and they
fell by 15 percent. So we need to recognize that there is a very, very
serious problem here that has to get addressed. But it won’t just go on
forever because if you follow that to its logical absurdity, one person
ends up with 90 percent of the wealth in the world. And that’s not going
to happen.

Raslan
Fadl, a doctor in a Nile delta village, is accused of killing
13-year-old schoolgirl Sohair al-Bata'a in a botched operation

A doctor is to stand trial in Egypt
on charges of female genital mutilation on Thursday, the first case of
its kind in a country where FGM is illegal but widely accepted.

Activists
warned this week that the landmark case was just one small step towards
eradicating the practice, as villagers openly promised to uphold the
tradition and a local police chief said it was near-impossible to stamp
out.

Raslan Fadl, a doctor in a Nile delta village, is accused of killing 13-year-old schoolgirl Sohair al-Bata'a in a botched FGM operation last June. Sohair's father, Mohamed al-Bata'a, will also be charged with complicity in her death.

Fadl
denies the charges, and claims Sohair died due to an allergic reaction
to penicillin she took during a procedure to remove genital warts.

"What
circumcision? There was no circumcision," Fadl shouted on Tuesday
evening, sitting outside his home where Sohair died last summer. "It's
all made up by these dogs' rights people [human rights activists]."

In
the next village along, Sohair's parents had gone into hiding,
according to their family. Her grandmother – after whom Sohair was named
– admitted an FGM operation had taken place, but disapproved of the
court case.

"This is her destiny," said the elder Sohair. "What can we do? It's what God ordered. Nothing will help now."

According to Unicef,
91% of married Egyptian women aged between 15 and 49 have been
subjected to FGM, 72% of them by doctors, even though the practice was
made illegal in 2008. Unicef's research suggests that support for the
practice is gradually falling: 63% of women in the same age bracket
supported it in 2008, compared with 82% in 1995.

But in rural
areas where there is a low standard of education – like Sohair's village
of Diyarb Bektaris – FGM still attracts instinctive support from the
local population, who believe it decreases women's appetite for
adultery.

Conservatives can label her a leftist all they want. She's a threat because she stands in the way of U.S. oligarchy

Have
you heard the one about Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) being a
leftist? Branding the junior senator from the U.S. state of
Massachusetts with that term suggests to the rest of the world that she
must be close to the camp of the Fidel Castros or some other
anti-capitalist revolutionaries.Just what is Mrs. Warren’s crime
that warrants such castigation? Speaking up for the concerns of everyday
Americans — consumers, debtors, working people, that’s what.

As the founding spirit behind the long-overdue establishment of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ,
Senator Warren saw to it that today’s Americans are finally able to
avail themselves of the same consumer rights that have been considered
as givens by their counterparts in Europe since the 1970s.What
makes the charge of labeling Warren a leftist almost comical is that,
when Europeans started to pursue the issue of consumer rights, they were
eager to emulate the world leader of the consumer movement at the time —
the United States.

Since that time, the United States has pretty much abandoned one of its smartest inventions — and left it to the Europeans to carry the flag of consumer rights forward .
(Note that a key reason why the European Commission is so reflexively
maligned in the U.S. media is precisely that it has established itself
as the key body to provide a check on expanding corporate powers in
Europe and beyond.)

Are consumer rights “leftist”?

In modern mass societies, working on these issues is a truly vital matter.

It
ensures that a nation’s citizens do not become powerless automatons who
are haplessly pushed around by big corporations, pretty much at the
latters’ free will.

Sadly, that is precisely what has happened in
the United States ever since the days of the (mislabeled) “Reagan
revolution.” The goal of Reagan’s backers was really the polar opposite
of a revolution — moving the social progress achieved until then back as
much as possible.

Since the early 1980s, the large corporations
of America have seen to it, in a close collaboration with an
ever-pliable U.S. Congress, that any further spreading of that consumer
rights movement got stopped in its tracks.

But
the truth is that this is actually code for training teachers in the
discredited philosophy that boys and girls are so fundamentally
different that they need to be taught using radically different methods —
methods that sound an awful lot like good old-fashioned sex
stereotypes.

Here are a few examples of the type of "training" we're talking about, plucked from a complaint filed on Tuesday by the ACLU and the ACLU of Florida against the state's second-largest school district:

A
professional development program run by the district that was required
for all new teachers in single-sex classes included a session called
"Busy Boys, Little Ladies" — geared toward kindergarten
teachers. Another required session is simply called "Gender
Differentiation: Boys and Girls Learn Differently."

Teachers
were trained that girls are not good at abstract thinking and learn best
through building relationships, while boys excel in concrete thinking
and learn best through competition.

Teachers of boys were
invited to a program entitled "Engaging Students with Debate and
Discussion," where teachers were instructed on how to "engage students
in higher level discourse." Teachers of girls, on the other hand, were
invited to a program called "Creating Connections with Girls" and
instructed that "Girls will learn better if they believe a teacher cares
about them."

The Hillsborough School District has spent
hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer funds to implement a hidden
curriculum, permeating practically every aspect of the classroom,
promoting — and reinforcing — the theory that boys and girls are
fundamentally different.

Of course, the truth is that every student learns differently — in ways that are not determined by sex — and there is no evidence
that any sex-based differences translate into the need to teach boys
and girls differently. In fact, it is precisely this kind of sex-based
over-generalization that our civil rights laws like Title IX were designed to prevent.

The
problem extends far beyond this one school district: We know of at
least three other school districts in Florida alone that are operating
similar programs relying on sex-stereotypes, and we have documented numerous similar programs across the country through our Teach Kids, Not Stereotypes campaign.

Pulitzer Prize winner David Cay Johnston tells Salon how America's economic story could end -- and it isn't pretty

Long
before anyone knew the name Thomas Piketty, Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist David Cay Johnston was plumbing the hidden depths of the
American tax code, revealing the myriad ways it privileges the interests
of corporations and the wealthy ahead of those of the 99 percent.
Indeed, while it may sometimes feel as if economic inequality is the new
trend, Johnston’s career reminds us that the great gulf that separates
the rich from the rest in the contemporary United States didn’t happen
overnight, but over a course of decades.

Despite coming out during the same year as “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” and “The Divide,” Johnston’s newest release, “Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality,”
is a different kind of inequality book. Rather than a sweeping overview
of centuries of economic history, or an on-the-ground examination of
how our justice system ignores the powerful while brutalizing the rest,
Johnston’s book is a collection of essays, speeches and excerpts — a
kind of inequality reader. Featuring insights from philosophers,
economists, journalists, researchers and even politicians, “Divided”
reminds us how inequality is one of those rare problems that truly
matters to all of us, no matter what our interests or chosen field.

Earlier
this week, Salon reached Johnston via telephone to discuss “Divided,”
whether American democracy can survive such great economic disparities,
and how returning to a more equal society is literally a matter of life
and death. Our conversation follows, and has been slightly edited for
clarity and length. In addition, Johnston followed up with further
thoughts via email.

What inspired you to create this book?

I had done a trilogy on hidden aspects of the American economy, “Perfectly Legal,” which was about how the rich benefit from taxes, “Free Lunch,” about all the subsidies people didn’t know about that go to rich people and corporations, and “The Fine Print,”
which was about restraint of trade and monopolies. And in speaking for
the last 10 years around the country, one of the things I learned is
that people didn’t understand that this isn’t just a function of numbers
and whatnot; they didn’t understand there’s a whole structure that
affects families, health, healthcare — which are different things —
incarceration, opportunity, exposure to environmental hazards, wage
theft and so, there was really a need here to give people a broad
understanding of, well, “How did this come about, this incredible
inequality that we didn’t have in this country until recent years?”

[After
the interview, Johnston emailed to add: "My trilogy on the American
economy explained many of the little-known, and often deceptive, laws,
regulations and official practices. But inequality involves much more
than what I had written about in the trilogy. I wanted to provide people
with a broad understanding of the issues, ranging from limited
opportunity and obstacles to achieving a modicum of prosperity, to the
remarkably cruel and thoughtless policies of the Reagan era."]

Now
that the warm weather is here, everyone is happily boxing away sweaters
and breaking out their summer clothes. But as students across the
country are bringing out their t-shirts and dresses, school
administrators are ramping up their efforts to quash cleavage and
"risqué" outfits.

According to educators and even some parents,
young women's outfits – their bodies, really – are too distracting for
men to be expected to comport themselves with dignity and respect. It's
the season of the dress code - so instead of teaching girls math or
literature, schools are enforcing arbitrary and sexist rules that teach
them to be ashamed of their bodies.

Take the example of a young woman in Virginia who was kicked out of her prom
this month because fathers attending the event though her dress was
giving rise to "impure thoughts". Clare, 17, says her dress was well
within guidelines for the event's dress code - it was "fingertip
length". She wrote on her sister's blog, "I even tried it on with my shoes, just to be sure."

Still,
she was asked to leave – thanks to a group of ogling dads perched on a
balcony above the dance floor. "I am so tired of people who abuse their
power to make women feel violated and ashamed because she has an ass, or
has breasts, or has long legs," she wrote

It's not just proms
that make for problematic interactions for young women. Everyday school
dress codes disproportionately target, shame, and punish girls –
especially girls who are more developed than their peers. In 2012,
students at Stuyvesant High School in New York (my old school) protested
the biased implementation of the school's dress code. One student noted that the “curvier” girls were singled out – a v-neck t-shirt considered acceptable on one student was seen as absolutely scandalous on another.Like
the fathers at Clare's prom, Stuyvesant administrators defended the
sexist dress code by saying girls shorts and spaghetti strap tank tops
are "distracting" to male students and teachers. This is a common theme
when policing the way women dress - just last month a junior high school in Illinois banned girls wearing leggings because they're "distracting to boys".

To
assuage the supposed distraction, girls caught wearing leggings are
forced to put on blue school shorts over them. At Stuyvesant, dress code
violators are pulled out of class and made to change into a large baggy
shirt. (There are dress codes for boys, but they're not as frequently
enforced and all a male student generally has to do is keep his pants up
and t-shirts referencing drugs inside-out.)

Kenneth KostMay 21, 2014Keys to freedom can take many forms. Samya’s was an iPod, a Twitter account, and a group of North Texas atheists.

Samya
is not her real name. The young Tarrant County resident asked that a
pseudonym be used in this story because she fears that the family
members she left behind might track her down and try to persuade her to
come home — or even kill her for dishonoring them by rejecting an
arranged marriage.

Her escape began more than two years ago,
several states away from Texas. Here she found intellectual and physical
freedom, friends, college, and the chance to build her own life. What
she left behind, the 21-year-old says, was a life of abuse and
imprisonment and a future she couldn’t face.Her family is from
the Middle East and steeped in an insular, extremely authoritarian
version of Islam. They moved to the United States when Samya was just an
infant.

“My mother has been mentally ill most of her life, and my
father was very violent and angry,” she said. “I grew up with a dad I
was afraid to talk to. Anything would set him off. He would come into my
room, throw me against the wall and beat me, and I wouldn’t know why.”
Her parents never showed her affection, she said — no hugs, no kisses.

The
older Samya got, the more her father tightened his grip on her life.
She was allowed to attend public schools through eighth grade. From age
15 on, she said, she was allegedly home-schooled. But there wasn’t much
schooling going on.

“They kept me locked inside the house most
days, and I wasn’t really even home-schooled,” she said. “I was being
taught how to take care of a family — cooking, cleaning, doing the
dishes and laundry. I was learning how to be a submissive housewife.”

Her
father continued to beat her, as he had her older brother, until she
was about 16 but never abused her younger siblings, she said. “I’m not
sure why it stopped. Maybe he got older and calmed down.”

After
she was pulled from public school, Samya was told she couldn’t have
non-Muslim friends. She did go to an actual school once a week to pick
up lessons and about once a month to do lab work for math and science
classes. She wasn’t allowed to participate in extracurricular
activities.

“The only kids I saw on a regular basis were the girls from my mosque,” she said.

She
still thinks sometimes about those girls, many of whom were allowed
more freedom than she, but most of whom intended to follow the path laid
out for them.

“Some of them were allowed to drive, go to public
schools and college, and had parents that were far more liberal than
mine,” but those young women still accepted the idea of arranged
marriages, she said.

A few of her friends also were physically
abused by parents and siblings, she said. And other girls dropped out of
school because they felt no need for it since they were just going to
get married and be housewives.

“It’s really horrible — some of
them had rough parents or were beat up by siblings,” she said. “The
parents wouldn’t do anything about it, because it’s the boy, and it’s
justified.

My choice to be child-free doesn't threaten my own mother, so I don't understand why some people insult her to explain me

There
are a lot of assumptions that people make about child-free women, and,
as someone who's been outspoken about my choices, I've heard all of
them: we're selfish, we're lazy, we're failing our fundamental role in
life. But the one that stings the most – and makes me the angriest – is
that we must have had terrible mothers, because nothing could be further
from the truth.

Every step of my mostly idyllic childhood, my mom
was around. A stay-at-home mother of two, she picked me up from school,
took care of me when I was sick, made me eat a healthy breakfast, took
me to the DMV for my first driver's test, comforted me when I failed,
and then took me back a week later for my second one (when I passed).
She taught me.

My mother and my father also made sure that I saw
the world and learned how many different kinds of people existed in it.
Whether it was a tour of the Scottish countryside or just a weekend trip
to the beach, my mom and my dad always instilled a lifelong love of
travel and of learning about the experiences of others. It's the
greatest gift I have ever been given, and I cherish them both every day
for it.

My mom always told me that when I grew up I could be anything that I wanted. And, to my own surprise, I did.I
know that I owe a lot of it to the kind of parent she was, the kind of
female role model she was (and is). My mom recognized my feminist
tendencies from an early age and always made a point of mentioning
successful women or noting a female role model she thought I could learn
from. She never censored my reading material and always encouraged my
writing ambitions. When my first book was published in 2010, she was the
first person in line to buy copies.

After being raised by a
devoted stay-at-home mother and seeing how much love and commitment my
mother was capable of, I knew that I just didn't have the same capacity
myself – and that every child in the world deserves the amount of love I
got growing up. There's only one of my mom, and I'm not her.

It's
hard not to notice that people in the position opposite to me – those
who had difficult childhoods but choose to be parents – are celebrated
for their desire to have and raise children. It's impossible to escape
narratives of parents and would-be parents who want to give children
what they never had, to correct the mistakes of their own youth, or to
simply raise their kids better than they were raised. Nobody attributes
any pathology to their choices, or assumes their parents were "bad" or
"abusive", or suggests that they need to get therapy to examine their
real motivations.

I don't know if the happy childhood I had is
something I could replicate in this day and age. We're a country that
festishizes motherhood, but we're not a country that wants to provide
federally-mandated parental leave – let alone encourage men to take it.
We're a country that will spend billions of dollars on cards, flowers
and brunches to celebrate our mothers one day a year, but will do
nothing to help them pay for childcare in order to work or fulfill their
own dreams for the other 364 days. We are a culture that shames women
who get pregnant in any less-than-ideal circumstance, and one that often
limits access to the education and contraception that would allow women
to choose the right time and place for them. We shame mothers for
breastfeeding and for not breastfeeding, for spanking and not spanking,
for giving birth at home and for giving birth in a hospital. We tell
women that choosing to have a child is the right choice, but it'll be
the last right choice that she'll ever make.

Learning is about rethinking our views. Censoring my students’ education before they obtain it will do the opposite

Brittney CooperTuesday, May 20, 2014Every
semester on the first day of my classes, I explain to students that at
some point during the semester, the material that we cover will
fundamentally challenge their thinking in some area that they hold dear,
particularly their beliefs about race, gender and sexuality. I also
explain to them that these challenges are less about making them change
their minds, although I do hope that they will discard some particularly
retrograde and unhelpful beliefs, and more about making them refine
their opinions, while becoming clear and informed about what they think.
If a student has not been challenged to fundamentally rethink the
beliefs they hold dear, they have not been to college.

Therefore
the growing national conversation, buttressed by demands from students,
that college professors place trigger warnings on their syllabi to alert
students to uncomfortable and traumatic material gives me great
concern. While I care about my own academic freedom and the ways that
trigger warnings impede my ability to teach course materials in the ways
I deem most appropriate, I care far more about educating students who
can entertain a range of competing views, wade through those beliefs,
and come out on the other side with clarity and the capacity to
articulate their position.

Yet, those of us in the academy are now
encountering the generation of students educated under the high-stakes
testing model of both No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. They are
a generation of students who are uncomfortable with being made
uncomfortable. They are a generation of students who want the right
answers, and the assured A, rather than the challenge of thinking and writing
their way through material that is more complex than the multiple
choice answer requires. To me, such an orientation to the world – the
desire for endless comfort – is an untenable educational proposition.

Encountering material that you have never encountered before, being
challenged and learning strategies for both understanding and engaging
the material is what it means to get an education.But in this era
of the corporate university, the belief in educating students to be
something other than laborers in the capitalist machine is increasingly
obsolete. In many respects I understand this position:

In a time when
good public education is increasingly difficult to access at reasonable
prices, creating strategies for making university education economically
feasible guides policymaking at many universities. The reality is that
parents want their children to be able to get out of school and get jobs
that will offer them an economic livelihood. In that kind of
environment it becomes harder to justify a robust humanities education
focused on thinking about questions of power, the nature of human
relationships, literature, history and politics.

Salon spoke to Rebecca Solnit about her new book, gender-based violence, and why "rape culture" is a useful phrase

Rebecca Solnit
is a decorated author and activist, but she may be best-known for the
word she added to our lexicon: “mansplaining.” Mansplaining was born
from a 2008 blog post in which Solnit wrote: “Men explain things to me,
and other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking
about.” Since then, “mansplaining” has taken the culturesphere by storm,
getting named one of the New York Times’ “words of the year” and
inspiring countless think pieces. Solnit has been writing elegant, sharp
essays and books for more than two decades — her latest book, also
called “Men Explain Things to Me,”
released today, is a collection of seven essays about this particular
facet of the modern gender wars. On the whole her work spans a broad
spectrum of subjects ranging from literature, art, philosophy,
anti-militarism and the environment. It is feminist, frequently funny,
unflinchingly honest and often scathing in its conclusions. In 2010,
the Utne Reader named Solnit,
who is the recipient of several literary awards, including a Guggenheim
Fellowship and a Lannan literary fellowship, one of 25 Visionaries Who are Changing Your World.

Tell
me about writing that first essay from which the name of the book is
taken, “Men Explain Things to Me.” As you mention in the book, it is a
piece that continues, years after publication, to be shared and
discussed.

I’d been joking about writing it for years.
Men explaining things to me had been happening my whole life. The
infamous incident I described — in which a man talked over me to explain
a Very Important Book he thought I should read that it turns out I
wrote — happened five years earlier in 2003.The term
“mansplaining” has resonated with so many women. It shifted the
cultural universe ever so slightly (in a good way). Did you expect this
response?

You know, I had a wonderful conversation
about a month ago with a young Ph.D. candidate at U.C. Berkeley. I’ve
been a little bit squeamish about the word “mansplaining,” because it
can seem to imply that men are inherently flawed, rather than that some
guys are a little over-privileged, arrogant and clueless. This young
academic said to me, “No, you don’t understand! You need to recognize
that until we had the word ‘mainsplained,’ so many women had this awful
experience and we didn’t even have a language for it. Until we can name
something, we can’t share the experience, we can’t describe it, we can’t
respond to it. I think that word has been extraordinarily valuable in
helping women and men describe something that goes on all the time.” She
really changed my opinion. It’s really useful. I’ve always been
interested in how much our problems come from not having the language,
not having the framework to think and talk about and address the
phenomenon around us.

Your work has always focused on
sexualized and gender-based violence. The second essay in your book,
“The Longest War,” is based on one you wrote in the wake of the Delhi
and Steubenville rapes. What are your thoughts on mainstream media
narratives regarding rape and domestic violence? Do you think we are at
an inflection point globally in public discourse surrounding these
subjects?

Yes, I really do. Remember when Nicole Brown
Simpson was murdered, more than 20 years ago? That started a
conversation about domestic violence and how often it becomes lethal and
how horrific and oppressive and terrifying and discriminatory it is.
Then O.J. Simpson lawyered up, in the way that incredibly rich men that
do awful things to women do, like Dominique Strauss-Kahn, or the recent
case of the billionaire Gurbaksh Chahal, who recently got off on
probation after allegedly hitting his girlfriend 117 times on camera.
There are just so many times when other kinds of hate crimes get the
attention they deserve, and I never feel that we shouldn’t pay attention
to other kinds of hate crimes, but I’ve just waited and waited and
waited for violence against women to be treated as a hate crime.

Groundwater loss from demand for farming in the Central Valley is putting pressure on San Andreas fault, Nature paper says

The
water use that helped produce California's agricultural bounty may be
increasing the chances of earthquakes along the San Andreas fault,
researchers said on Wednesday.

A new study, published in Nature on Wednesday,
said groundwater depletion in California's Central Valley – the heart
of its agricultural industry – is putting additional pressures on the
fault, and promoting the chances of an earthquake.

The study did not predict how and when that earthquake might occur.

The paper is among the first to attribute a human component to earthquakes along the San Andreas fault. Other researchers have established a connection between small earthquakes in Ohio and underground disposal of waste water from fracking.

The
researchers, led by Colin Amos of Western Washington University, used
data from GPS networks to analyse the tiny movements in the Central
Valley and the surrounding mountains.Scientists have known for years that the floor of the valley has been dropping as the groundwater is pumped out for irrigation.

An
estimated 160 km3 of ground water in the Central Valley has been lost
through pumping, irrigation and evaporation over the past 150 years.

The
rate of that depletion is accelerating, because of expanding
population, increased demands for agriculture and recurring drought –
which means that the groundwater can not be readily replaced.Meanwhile,
the mountains surrounding the valley have also been undergoing tiny
shifts each summer and autumn, moving upward as the seasonal snowpack
melts.

Those competing pressures have brought the San Andreas fault closer to failure, the researchers said.“The
human effect is becoming the dominant effect,” said Paul Lundgren of
Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “The more you deplete that
groundwater, the more you keep promoting that fault towards failure.”

He
said the human influence was fairly significant – around the order of
the knock-on effect from other large earthquakes of relatively close
faults. Growing demand for groundwater – because of drought – would put
the fault under more pressure.

But it was impossible to say at this point when the next big earthquake might occur.

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson